His long cloak brushed against the gray stone floor, the sound accompanied only by the gentle, but commanding clack clack of the stiff heels of his boots. He was polished to a fine shine from head to toe, from the gleam of his black hair to the reflection of the lights above in the toes of his shoes. Shadow, he was called, Ilhyemir. Not his true name, but it suited him just as well, for it was rightly earned. Ilhyemir was pearl black, the only points of color on his person being his eyes, both a deep coral red. Ilhyemir, Devil of the Deepwalk, and he was on the hunt.
Ilhyemir was large, a true warrior of the S'hedmethil. Even under his fitted leather armor one could see the ripple of heavy muscle as he moved. Coming to the end of the walkway he prowled, he shoved the double doors open, knocking aside the guards posted on the other side. They shouted in protest and moved to stop him, until they saw who they dealt with. Even unarmed, Ilhyemir was not to be trifled with.
“What is the meaning of this intrusion?” a dark elven woman sitting on a throne at the far end of the room demanded.
Ilhyemir did not stop until he was standing at her feet. Here, he dropped to one knee and crossed his left arm over his chest in a salute.
“The phylactery has been moved.”
“What?” the woman shifted in her chair so that she was leaning over Ilhyemir.
He looked up.
“We have sighted our quarry, but we have the feeling he isn't going to be holding still much longer.”
“He?”
Ilhyemir nodded.
“The necromancer's brother.”
“She has no siblings.”
“No living ones.”
The woman tilted her head to one side, attempting to ascertain what Shadow meant by that.
“She passes on her trusted phylactery, her life-source, to a mindless undead?”
Ilhyemir shook his head and stood.
“No. Not mindless, sadly, or our job would be finished. We've done our research. Zauaere Delyl's brother died almost six hundred years ago.”
“What? Was he resurrected?”
“Not quite. She poured an immense amount of magic into him mere minutes after he died, before his soul had fled his body. He is free-willed, immortal, and it makes him strong.”
“So we have something more akin to a banshee or a Lich on our hands here, then?”
“We do have a Lich on our hands.”
Liches were, in short, what Archmages were to wizards in the world of necromancy. They were masters of their chosen craft, manipulation of the dead, as well the art of illusion. Liches were casters that had traded their human feelings, love, compassion, for an immortal body. Without their powers of illusion, Liches appeared as skeletal forms of themselves, their flesh a sacrificial component of the most difficult spell any necromancer would ever cast. However, Liches could appear in what ever form they wished, from man to animal. Zauaere Delyl had simply chosen to retain her true form. Ilhyemir had no idea why.
The woman on the throne furrowed her brow in either thought or disgust, he couldn't tell. Mistress Asthana's moods were as capricious as the Deepwalk winds, sometimes beneficial, other times purely murderous. Ilhyemir had simply learned not to guess or assume with the woman. She would make herself known soon enough. He watched her, pretty little thing that she was, recline back into the too-large throne, crossing her legs to reveal one shapely thigh through the cut in her dress. She reached up and caressed the skull set into the stone at the top of the chair. It was well known that the skull had once belonged to her father, past ruler of her House. Before she had murdered him for the position, of course. Asthana was a sensual creature, proud of her body and the power it had over her male counterparts at court. If she couldn't win something with threats of violence, she seduced her target instead. Love and war, all neatly packaged in a silver-haired young woman.
“So, the Lady Delyl has converted, then?” There was a purr in Asthana's voice.
Ilhyemir never knew why the Mistress bothered with him. He worked for her and he wasn't particularly interested in her tricks. Asthana was a well known black widow, but the sons of lesser noble Houses always hoped they would be the one to win her heart and become Consort. It wasn't likely to happen. While Ilhyemir appreciated the attention, any man would from a creature so soft and yet so wicked, the effort didn't further her with him any. Perhaps she thought it kept him loyal.
“Yes, the transformation is complete. She has only recently cast her illusion and it is a powerful one. One of her attendants so graciously told me that she went so far as to even replicate her own heartbeat. She gave away the phylactery before she became vulnerable. Liches are at their weakest the hours after their casting.”
“Have we missed that window, Ilhyemir?”
“Yes, sadly. She has powerful wizards under her employ. Lady Delyl was no longer in the House after her conversion. We have a strong hint that she wasn't even on this plane of existence anymore, for a time anyway.”
“What of the agent you sent to the surface?”
“We had followed the phylactery to the human city of Tellhemport. The fool I sent set the building our target was staying in ablaze instead of outright killing him. I think the notion of the undead made him uncomfortable.”
“Made?”
“He is no longer with us.”
“Pity.” There was no pity in Asthana's voice.
“What would you have me do now?”
“Orders, orders,” Asthana breathed, sliding off her fur-covered throne. She shot a glare at the two door guards and they departed at once. “Is that all you ever think of?”
“You pay me to do so,” Ilhyemir replied, watching Asthana as she slunk towards him.
“Perhaps it is time for the Devil to entertain an improvement in pay?”
“I believe you've teased me with such a thing before.” He stood impassively as Asthana pressed herself against him. She was almost a full foot shorter than he. The Devil was a monster among his folk.
Asthana laughed.
“Perhaps I have.” Reaching up she undid the clasps to his cloak, letting it fall to the ground. Her slender fingers made fast work of the belts that held Ilhyemir's breastplate tight to his chest and it soon fell away too.
“Have you ever considered moonlighting as an assassin?” Ilhyemir quietly suggested, a small smile on his lips. “You certainly have the fingers for it.”
Those same fingers were undoing the ties to his undershirt now, revealing taut muscle. Ilhyemir was a man of action. It seemed he had not an ounce of fat on him to spoil the lines of his body. Asthana traced a pale gray scar that ran across the left side of his chest. A blow to the heart that should have killed him.
“You could become Consort, you know,” she stood up on her toes to bite gently at his collarbone and smiled when the ever stoic soldier moved his head slightly back to accommodate her.
“If I just gave in, you would get bored with me and then were would I be?”
Asthana knew he was right. He was a hunter and as such he could identify other hunters leagues away. A hunter's only pleasure was in the chase and if the prey were to simply stop and surrender the thrill was lost. Ilhyemir was certainly not one to surrender. However, he was loyal, and he was a soldier, he was not about to ignore commands, either. So, as she had done a hundred times before, she steered Ilhyemir towards the throne and pushed him into it. Asthana knew very well that the light shove to his stomach wasn't enough to knock him down, so she was always pleased when Ilhyemir went against his nature for her and simply slid into the chair.
She climbed up after him, straddling his hips and tangling her fingers in his oh so dark hair. It was not often that a S'hedmethite came out black from head to toe. Asthana studied his face, the narrow, gemstone-bright eyes, the sharp eyebrows that gave him the look of a surface hunting hawk. His lips were soft and full for a male and always pursed ever so slightly, as if in thought.
Ilhyemir let Asthana play as she would, for he knew she took pleasure in the fact that she could frustrate him so. And frustrate him she did. With touches and bites and brief meetings of lips to skin. Unless he agreed to become her Consort, her permanent mate, she would never allow him to bed her. No, in the world of the S'hedmethil, even the bearing of children was a matter of politics. She would tease him until he ached with it and then she'd leave him.
No, he wasn't interested in joining her little world of murder and the need to climb the social ladder and their brief forays had nothing to do with the information he provided her, but he was well aware that physically, he was her thrall.
And he'd return for the torture day after day.
Zhevir snarled in frustration.
“I can't,” he insisted sitting on the edge of the bed. While his days were spent aiding in the rebuilding of Lylah's inn, the lack of someplace warm to stay at night had sent him back to his old ways, into the arms of the brothel women who didn't care that his skin was like ice.
“What do you mean you can't?” While most of the women Zhevir encountered were perfectly content with the fact that Zhevir was satisfied with touching and closeness, this particular one wouldn't be sated unless they had gone from start to finish. Zhevir, not having any blood in his body, couldn't finish. It was physically impossible.
“I just can't, daft woman. Gods on high, are you deaf?” Zhevir was only still sitting there, being berated by a woman he was paying for, because it was sweltering hot in the room and still dark and freezing outside.
She crossed her arms over her chest.
“What? It doesn't work?”
She had given him an excuse.
“Yeah, it doesn't,” he shot back angrily. Even if he was dead, he was still a man and it wasn't something he cared to admit.
The woman stopped then, seeming ashamed that she had forced him to admit it. After a while, she spoke up.
“Does it just, not work or is something wrong with it?”
Zhevir gave her a sidelong look and sighed, running his hands over his face and through his hair. What was he going to tell her? He didn't have anything in his body to get it up with? That would be hard to explain.
“The other girls tell me you're kind of strange.”
“Strange?”
“Yeah, like,” he hesitated, looking down and fussing with the bed covers. “You stop and listen to their hearts a lot, their pulses.”
So they had noticed. Zhevir had never been with this woman before, but if she had heard stories, there was a chance she had noticed as well.
“You're a vampire, aren't you?”
That lost Zhevir.
“A what?”
“You know. One of those sexual deviants. The girls tell me the noblemen are really getting into it.”
A sexual deviant certainly wasn't what Zhevir had been thinking about.
“That doesn't explain what it is.”
“Blood,” she said flatly. “I mean, the noblemen can have whichever woman they want, right? Some of 'em get mean and hit us. Guess they up and decided that if they can break the skin, they should be able to have that, too.”
Zhevir looked at her.
“What are you suggesting?”
She slipped from the bed to rummage in a worn sack on the floor. She produced a knife, a long thing, probably used for fishing at one point, with a sharp edge only on one side.
“The Mistress tells us we're allowed to. It's good for all of us if we do.”
She probably meant they got to charge more of a man if he cut one of her girls. Sliding back into bed, she carefully took the point of the knife and pressed it to her fingertip. A small point of blood welled up around it.
Zhevir watched it intently, oddly fascinated by the small drop. He could smell the metallic tang of it. He recoiled a bit when she pushed her finger towards his face, trying to stay focused on it.
“Go on,” she urged.
When the dark elf didn't immediately do anything, she crawled into his lap and pressed her finger to his lips, smearing the blood there, bright red against black. The scent alone was intoxicating, but when gently lapped at his lips to wipe the stuff away, he moaned softly. It made the woman smile. Slipping away again, she danced out of the room and returned a short while later with a small tin box. Evidently she had gone to speak with another one of the girls who had experience with these “vampires” as she started laying out bandages on the only rickety table in the room.
What were they doing? Zhevir didn't drink blood! This was madness! But the coppery flavor lingered on his tongue and his body ached for it in a way he hadn't felt since he was alive. He was confused and he felt lightheaded. Did this make him a monster? The woman was surrendering her blood willingly, though, he hadn't asked for it or commanded it of her. Hell, he hadn't even hit her to suck the blood from his knuckles. Would anyone notice? Would anyone care? The questions rattled around in his skull, each screaming in demand for an answer Zhevir didn't have. Meanwhile, the woman climbed back into his lap, seemingly entirely at ease with what was about to happen.
Closing one eye, as one does when expecting a a sharp pinch, the woman pressed the blade to her chest and moved swiftly, opening a long gash. Zhevir tried to cry out, tell her to stop, but his protests were muffled when she reached out and dragged his mouth to her wound. It was enough that it would have probably made a normal man sick, vampire or not, but the blood settled in a searing hot pool in Zhevir's gut and he could feel small rivulets of it running over his lips and down his chin. She had cut herself deeply.
As abruptly as she had dragged him in, the woman pushed Zhevir away and slapped a sheet of cloth over her wound and pressed down.
Zhevir wiped his face with his hand and licked the blood from his fingers. He felt hot and something thrummed in his body like a drum. He was trying to make sense of things when he felt the woman's nails run down his stomach. Each left a trail of fire in its wake. He arched his back, suddenly sweating, his muscles stood out in the candlelight, each wire-tight. The blood had awakened every slumbering nerve in his body like a rejuvenating elixir. If the sensations restored by the holy blade had been overwhelming before, Zhevir was on the verge of swooning now.
“More,” he begged, breathless.
“You'll have to pay for her too.”
“I don't care.”
The woman vanished again and returned with another. The newcomer had a small collection of scars. She was more experienced in these strange matters. Taking the blade away, she stretched Zhevir out on the bed and cut herself as well. He drank deeply and all at once a sort of savageness overcame him. He pushed the woman onto her back and recognized her as one he'd been with before, another woman here he'd never actually bedded.
“You're warm, for once,” she said, smiling a viper's smile.
He felt like he was on fire and when she reached down and gripped him, not only was he nearly painfully aroused, the sensation that surged up through his body was enough to make the edges of his vision go dark.
The first woman sat down on the end of the bed as the second pushed Zhevir into her arms.
“Look at him,” the first murmured. “He's like a cat, all ready to pounce.”
She was right. All of Zhevir's muscles had bunched and gone tight as if he were ready to go into battle. He didn't understand it.
“Seems we need to loosen him up, then,” the second purred.
Later, as the sun was coming up, Zhevir stumbled out of the brothel and into the alley across the way. His head spun and his body ached. Every inch of him shook as if the very earth beneath his feet quaked. He stumbled and fell into a snowdrift, but the cold was soothing instead of frightening this time, for it cooled his burning flesh. He curled up in the stuff, smashing the white flakes into a dirty churning of slush and hid his face in his arms.
Never again, he swore. Never. He sobbed he was so sick with it. At the height of it the sensations had been amazing, every part of him felt like it was being exposed to feeling for the first time in his life. He felt stronger, faster, and Gods, if he had shared a night with a woman that intense while he still drew breath, he couldn't remember it. But now, that he was coming down off this strange high, his limbs felt weak and full of lead and his head full of cotton. His stomach churned, rebelling against the life-blood that wasn't his own. He coughed once and left a stain of red on the snow before him. Groaning aloud, he rolled away from it. He was coughing up blood that wasn't his own.
“'Ey, sir, you doin' al'ight?” came a voice from the mouth of the alley.
Zhevir turned dizzily to face him and could feel a drizzle of something hot on his lip. The owner of the voice, an older man, cringed away from him.
“Gods fer yer soul, you,” he said, drawing the sign of a five-point star over his face, invoking the Goddess of Mercy. “The plague don't leave many standin' after i's come.” With that, he shuffled away.
The plague? Oh Gods! Zhevir scrubbed at his face, trying to clean it of blood his body was rejecting. Getting to his feet, Zhevir fell and slipped his way to the back of the alley, his nose running blood all the while. He collapsed to his hands and knees in the snow again and retched.
Once he had finally emptied his stomach of its foul contents, he sat back and stared at the mess.
“Good Gods, it looks like I murdered someone back here.” Had he really drank so much blood? There was no way. The women looked fine! Or they pretended to. He shook his head which immediately made him sick again, but there was nothing left to clean his gut of.
He didn't know what to do. He couldn't go back to the inn. His clothes were spotted with blood and his skin was feverishly hot. If he somehow managed to hide the blood on his clothes, the sudden change in body temperature would be obvious to both Aden and Lylah
“Damn it, damn it, damn it,” he hissed, wobbling to his feet again. At the very least he needed to get away from the pool of gore. It wasn't making him feel any better.
Ilhyemir hated the surface. It was bright and open and cold. However, that's where his target hid, so that was where he would go. In his usual black lacquered leather armor, Ilhyemir had only added the pelt of some black-furred creature to his ensemble, winding it around his throat to ward off the cold. He sat astride a mepheet, the most common of Underbelly mounts. It looked, for the most part, like a horse, with it's long equine snout and swiveling ears. However, it's body was long enough to seat almost four people and sported six legs ending in the cloven hooves of a surface goat, something more suited to waking on rocks than a real horse's hooves. It's hide was also tough and leathery instead of furred, allowing it to slide between rock walls without getting stuck. It was a creature well adapted to the tunnels deep under the earth.
However, it was a creature that Ilhyemir would have to abandon now that he was sky-side, because while the sun hurt Ilhyemir's eyes and forced him to squint and look at the ground for the most part, the mepheet was positively blind in the sunlight. The mepheet gave a strange lowing noise, one that would have bounced off walls and given the creature direction in the confines of a cave, but here it only spread out for miles in every direction, causing it more distress than the pain of the sun did.
Dismounting, Ilhyemir steered the creature back to the cave opening he had used to reach the surface and slapped it's flank. Once in the Underbelly the creature would find its own way back to the food and shelter provided by its stable. Or it would be eaten. Either way, it was out of Ilhyemir's hands now. Straightening his broadsword on his back, the Devil went over his equipment one last time and set off in the direction of Tellhemport.
He looked skyward, shading his eyes with his hands. Unless he learned to fly sometime soon, he'd have to learn to think on a two-dimensional scale. In the Underbelly there were always tunnels above and below you, so S'hedmethil maps were metal orbs made of sheets of steel that could be pulled out or inserted depending on your height or depth in a cave or tunnel system. While he knew how to use a sky-side map, the concept of thinking as if the world was flat in order to travel was a little hard to wrap his mind around.
Pulling his hood up to further shade his eyes, Ilhyemir sighed to himself and started his trek. The walk would be long.
There was an uncomfortable murmuring in the inn the next day. Something had burned a village on the other side of the continent. It had been months and months ago and normally this sort of news wouldn't have reached their ears, aside from hearsay, but it was how the village had been burned that kept the message spreading like wildfire. It was gone, totally and utterly decimated. There were no bodies, no charred remains, no hollowed out skeletons of buildings or piles of ash. Just a black smear where the heart of a community had once been. It made people nervous.
Zhevir didn't know what to make of it. After cleaning himself up he had returned to the inn to this influx of strange news. Mostly it was people sitting around the remains of the common space chatting while they rested between shifts on rebuilding. The community had been immensely helpful in the reconstruction of Lylah's inn, something else alien to Zhevir. If an establishment had burned in his home city, its competitors not only would have gloated over their misfortune, but probably would have stoked the flames.
Regardless of the charity of the area, Lylah was still paying for the repairs herself. While she had the foresight to plan for some sort of disaster, her funds weren't enough for something of this magnitude. Zhevir had even given her the last of his money, again as much help to him as it was to her. He figured if he had no money left he wouldn't be so tempted to see the witches who had fed him their blood. He shivered just thinking about it.
Still, Lylah needed more money. It was his fault that the place had been set on fire in the first place. Surely there was something he could do about it. He could get a job someplace, but he really didn't possess any of what the surface world referred to as “retail experience”. He was a nobleman, he bossed people around and that had been his job. Besides that, accepted in this area or not, he was still a dark elf. Most people were still quite convinced he was going to gut them alive and eat their entrails.
Sitting down on a crate of supplies that had been emptied, Zhevir rested his head in his hands. A long time ago he had been a soldier, but the two long daggers he fought with back then were long gone. He wasn't sure he wanted to enlist in the city's army, that would defeat the purpose of getting the money in the first place. They would ship him off someplace and he'd never see Aden or Lylah again.
Speaking of the devil, Aden trotted up and plopped down on the box next to Zhevir.
“What's wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Doesn't look like nothing.”
Zhevir gave him a sidelong glance.
“Fine, nothing isn't wrong.”
Aden mouthed that phrase, trying to get the double negative.
“Oh. Do you need help?”
“I need a job.”
“You have a job. You guard the inn!”
“Yeah, and I'm getting paid by Lylah, with money and lodging and food she no longer has.”
The boy made a hmmm sound and sighed.
“That's true. What are you good at?”
Killing, Zhevir thought to himself. Master-at-Arms, that had been his title before he died and he had well earned it. He had been a terror himself in his home city.
“Nothing.”
“You can't be good at nothing. Stop that.”
“Well, what do you suggest? I'm not exactly prime stock for sales and I don't know any trade skills.”
“None at all?”
“None at all.”
“Well,” Aden paused and rubbed at his chin, something he'd started since the men in the inn had introduced to him the idea of a beard being a conduit of thought. “Lylah already pays you to beat people up, why don't you go beat people up someplace else?”
“I don't beat people up!”
“Okay, you throw them out the door and then the ground beats them up. Either way, they get beat up.”
Zhevir rolled his eyes.
“What are you suggesting, exactly?” He shouldn't have said that. The last time he said that it had gotten him in trouble. Judging by the glitter in Aden's eyes, it was about to get him in trouble again.
“Well, I know some people...”
“You're too young to know some people.”
“Not true! I do! You could get to know them too. They have money and they'd give it to you if you did stuff for them.”
Guessing by the fact that Aden's past profession had been that of a pickpocket, Zhevir had an idea where this was going. There had been thieves' guilds in his city as well and they were dirty and cutthroat, more so than their average brethren. He assumed that the guilds of humans would be much the same.
“I'm not going to sneak around back alleys and steal people's coin purses.”
“Nah, that's not what I was thinking, plus, that's my job. Why would I suggest you go clear my turf?”
It was strange to hear Aden speak like that, like a businessman, like a peddler of wares in a square at the market. It didn't fit his young form.
“What did you mean, then?”
“Something you're more suited for. You said it yourself, you're scary.”
“I never said that.”
“You said you couldn't sell things. The only reasons people don't buy things is because either the price or the salesman scares them.”
“You have a point.”
“Of course I do. So, are you going to go or not?”
Zhevir studied Aden for a while. He knew the boy wouldn't purposely put him in danger. He also knew that the boy meant well and that his intentions were good. Then again, as the saying went, the road to hell was paved with good intentions. Looking up unto the scaffolding that had been erected around the back of the building and the quarter dozen men crawling about it like spiders on a fresh web, hammering hard won wood with harder won nails, Zhevir realized he didn't have much of a choice.
“I'll do it.”
Aden smiled.
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